Pothole near Crowland damages five vehicles within minutes of each other

A motorist was left ‘furious’ after five vehicles suffered flat tyres on the same stretch of road within minutes of one another.

Sean Cooke, who was one of the drivers involved in the incident on Hull’s Drove, near Crowland, two days after his wife Rachael had reported the pothole in question after her vehicle was damaged at the same spot.

Mr Cooke, of Holbeach St John’s, was heading towards the A16 in his Vauxhall Astra estate on his way to work in Peterborough at around 5.50am on Thursday when he saw a car on the roadside with its hazard lights on.

It was as he slowed to avoid the vehicle he hit the pothole.

“I heard a bang, a huge bang,” said Mr Cooke, who suffered a damaged tyre and soft tissue damage to his neck and shoulder.

“If I was doing 60mph I’d have been in the dyke.

“I had a blow out and lost traction straight away and I was doing 40 as I had to slow down.”

Within minutes five vehicles had flat tyres along the same stretch of road, with a further two reportedly suffering the same damage later that morning. Police were called and arrived to warn traffic.

Two days earlier Mrs Cooke suffered damage to her Vauxhall Adam when a ‘large piece of road flicked up under my car, causing me to swerve.”

In an email, Mrs Cooke added: “I reported this to Highways and they told me they would get someone out urgently to assess the road. I took my car to get checked and the middle part of the exhaust is broken. Now, this has happened to my husband and four others, with the same pothole.”

Mr Cooke added: “Why does it take the police to order Highways to shut the road when my wife reported it two days earlier and they said they’d be out?

“I’m furious. I pay my council tax and road tax. Where is it going?”

A highways spokesperson said: “We’ve got an emergency response crew headed out today (Thursday) to make safe as best as possible, and then multiple pothole repairs have been planned for tomorrow (Friday),” they said. We do understand the frustration felt and are responding to this as quickly as we can.

“With the nature of the road, and the ground beneath it which is moving after the very dry summer we’ve been through causing a continuing shift in the ground, we may find that we have to keep returning to site in order to fill potholes in the short-term.

“We have a £400,000 scheme to reconstruct and resurface the road happening next year which is the earliest that we can put in a full reconstruction at this location.”

A police statement confirmed that they assisted highways following reports of several vehicles with damaged tyres.